Some characters are not displayed [Unicode]

[Scott Sumner]

As pretty much exclusively an “A to Z” person (what, there’s more than that? :-D)…the issue discussed in this thread seems to come up quite often. From my limited perspective, this thread seems to explain things pretty well. So…why not make a “FAQ Desk” entry out of it and we can just forget about it–meaning it is a solved thing?

The general complaint always seems to be “Notepad.exe can display my characters, why can’t Notepad++?”. To me, @PeterJones 's post explained that–I had no idea. Peter (and Guy) seem to have the best grasp on the concepts here, so I would hope one of them (or a collaboration) could do a “FAQ Desk”.

[Mikhail V]

@Nazipa-M-m said:

I went through all the fonts in notepad ++, scrolling, although most of it shows all the characters … but it’s not that perfect, only “consolas” is perfect in style, although it does not display all the characters like a simple windows notepad.

Only few fonts support those symbols.
From the default pre-installed fonts the best would be “Segoe UI Symbol”.
Some others: SimSun, MS Gothic.

In MS Notepad all fonts work because it has font fallback system (as others already explained). In Notepad++ it does not work.

[Nazipa M m]

Thanks, it is necessary to reconcile to this difference -_-.

[SalviaSage]

Hello everyone. I just tested some symbol characters in notepad++ and indeed, notepad++ doesn’t seem to have some kind of a font fallback feature when a font can not display some of the characters.

Also, in some other word processors, (and maybe also text editors?) you can choose to use different fonts in the same file, which we can not do in notepad++.

Notepad++ just forces you to use a single font everywhere at all times :( except for example you can set a different font for the line numbers but otherwise, can not change the font for individual characters.

Does anyone know how we can at least make different characters use different fonts in notepad++? if we can do that, that would solve our problem.

[Nazipa M m]

Well, you can solve this problem if you put a supporting symbol in front, like.
Here are the symbols for the test, but this is not an option;), and at the same time it is difficult to wean from the “consolas”.

-------------------Test Notepad++ Consolas------------------------------------------
〕--------⇓…⇓----------
〕⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆ ⛆

》《ジツッ₸₽€¥฿۞۩ஜ✽❄⚜▬🚀🔑🔐✂✃✈👕👣👖☀✉☎☏✆◼️■▄█▀🔲◻️🔳◄►
🔻⚫★±ᥦᥪ⁜⁞⇌⇗␥▎
░▒▓⛆TʰᵉGʰᵒˢᵗⒽⒶⓅⓅⓎ༺༻🐾｡☆🏃💰∆〔〕
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[Claudia Frank]

@Nazipa-M-m , @SalviaSage

Notepad++ is not a word processor - it is a very advanced text editor.
The concepts behind npp and word processors like LibreOffice Writer or
MS Office Word are totally different.

Npp, I assume, will never be a word processor - so if you need
an application which allows you to configure every single piece in a
document stay with apps like LibreOffice, MSOffice etc…

From startup, npp has been designed to be fast and lightweight
and its main goal was, and I think still is, to be a tool for
programming purposes. During time and creation of plugins,
npp got a second application area - easy data manipulation tool.

But one thing which can’t be done yet, and as said, I assume never will be the case,
is to use npp as a replacement for a word processor.
The reason why I’m that confident is, that the underlying scintilla control
hasn’t been designed for such purpose either.

So, if such features from Writer and Word are needed, stick with those apps,
otherwise you chose the wrong tool for the work to be done.

Cheers
Claudia

[SalviaSage]

Hmm. What you say makes sense. I use libre office for my linguistics work. But, I also like to mix programming with linguistics and that’s where notepad++ comes in. It just would be good to be able to display more characters from within notepad++ and that requires the use of different fonts. That’s all.

[Claudia Frank]

@SalviaSage

Using different fonts in the current document is possible but I guess not in the way you want it to have.

High level description about how scintilla is working.
Scintilla uses lexers to tokenize the current document and to assign different styles to those tokens.
A lexer is basically code which scans the document based upon predefined and hardcoded rules.
Token is the text/string which results if a rule could be applied.
Styles are the definition how such Tokens should be displayed like which font name, size, style etc… should be applied.

So, a comment style can have a different font than, let’s say, a keyword.
But the lexer has to know beforehand the rule to identify this part of the text.
Means you could have a comment block in C++ using a different font then the rest of the code,
but there is a 1:1 relation - one token, one style.

But I guess what you want is to have the possibility to dynamically mark some kind of text
and then assign a different font. In general, this can be done by using scripting plugins like
python script or lua script but you have to be aware that

a) it is not persistent (this is also true for the builtin lexers anyway)
b) you are limited in the number of possible styles (each font attribute might be a different style, combinations of the attributes as well)
c) you cannot use it together with builtin lexers
d) possibly other things I’m currently not thinking about.

Hope this clarifies it a little bit more.

Cheers
Claudia

[Nazipa M m]

I found one program “RJ TextEd”, opens “Consolas + unicode” as notepad.exe.

[jablka]

@Nazipa-M-m
Hi all,
just by chance, I have found the solution here:
https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/post/67983
Simply in Settings | Preferences | MISC.
enable the option “Use DirectWrite”…
And restart Notepad++.

We definitely needed this!